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You know what always goes well? When Valve offers to release something early if only customers do something for them. That’s something with a solid history. Leaping onto this unwaveringly endorsed theme once more, Valve have announced plans on the Left 4 Dead blog to release Dead Air from community-co-created Cold Stream DLC pack early if enough people bug test the new campaign for them.

This next DLC is a big one. Along with the campaign created by community member Matthew Lourdelet, they also plan to release the three remaining campaigns from the original L4D so they work in L4D2.

So if more than 20,000 people gain the “Stream Crosser” achievement, awarded for completing the beta of the new campaign, by this Sunday, they’ll release L4D1 campaign Dead Air early. On 22nd July. Nothing can go wrong!

This is all only good for the PC version, which is available today (for another 8 hours) at 75% off. Which is £3.74. Which is a very tiny amount of money.

83 Comments

There’s nothing wrong with it because it’s “do X of Y and Z happens” where all three are quantifiable, rather than “do what we have arbitrarily determined to be enough of something and maybe some of some other thing will happen.”

The thing they’ve done right here is set a simple bar value — if 20,000 people get an achievement then something happens. The Potato ARG nonsense was a bar that you were playing to make speed up and then people were frustrated that they couldn’t see that their gameplay was having any impact (although, complaining that you played video games and nothing tangible happened as a result seems incredibly meta to me).

Also it theoretically has a fairly direct effect, assuming somewhat optimistically that they’ll actually take note of bug reports from the period to improve the map.

…although when I played it last night partly for Summer Camp purposes I noticed some missing textures, so I guess all the testing it’s had so far has only been so helpful. And L4D2 is not the kind of game where I could just take a moment to start filing a bug report where I stood.

I’m quite looking forward to having a concrete value to work out the number of people who have the achievements (eg. 79% of players have the Acid Reflux achievement and what does that mean in old money?)

If a exclusive is wen you sell a limited amount of X ( exclusive item, only 100 units ). This is like the reverse of a exclusive, a evisulcex (read as: evil-suck-exc), because is only available if people ‘buy’ more than 100 units.

I think the deal here is that if the 20k people play through Cold Stream, then they release the DLC ahead of time. The DLC contains Cold Stream, plus the remaining original L4D maps converted for use in L4D2.

It makes a sort of sense. More beta testers means the testing process should go faster, so it can be released earlier. But “completing the campaign” doesn’t necessarily involve actually testing it in any useful way, so you’re likely to just get a lot of people pretending to test. Which makes it a bit rubbish.

At this point it’s more of a volume testing. There were probably lots of rounds of internal, careful beta testing, with people actually checking things around.

So this kind of careful testing was done, but some little things can go past that. So a volley of 20000 players going through the campaign is a good idea, since you will have in the mass some going in ways not intended to.

I’m not sure what pretending to test really looks like. If 20,000 people complete a level in slightly different ways and they get to the end and finish the level as expected, doesn’t that just mean the level works?
The achievement should tend to make people playing Cold Stream and have it bug out complain to Valve more: “I tried to mêlée a charger on a ramp halfway through and my screen went green, give me my achievement goddamnit”.

Well, I’d say one aspect of pretending to test is seeing a bug and ignoring it, because they just want to get to the end for that achievement and don’t want to take the time to properly report it. Another aspect would be playing ‘normally’ and not looking for the edge cases where bugs are most likely to be extant, again because they just want to finish it for the achievement.

Anyone else disappointed with Left 4 Dead 2? It seems like I’m the only one who feels this way but I think Left 4 Dead 1 had better pacing. Left 4 Dead 2’s director loves to throw the “Uncommon Infected” enemies all the time and it makes those enemies not seem as special. I also feel like L4D2 throws more hordes of Zombies at one time which makes the game slower.

I just feel like Left 4 Dead 1 was a faster and tighter game. There were more periods of silence and idle zombies standing around which made the full attacks more memorable to me.

I agree, although I think that melee weapons and adrenaline are just as big culprits. I remember taking time to set up near a crashed plane in “Dead Air” and feeling like a real fire team. That focused, meditative feel is much rarer in L4D2, though I play it as much or more.

They do play slightly differently, L4D1 has better maps, but overall I enjoy L4D2 more than 1, as the new special infected balance out the game a bit, especially stopping closet camping. Non special infected aren’t meant to be special really.

Yup. That and I hated the (now apparently fixed, but that does me no good) weapon viewmodels being at ear height and the lack of legs. I think I only played through it twice at most in MP, compared to countless times for L4D1.

This is absurd, and might destroy the whole game as we know it. Personally, I think that everyone who pre-ordered L4D2 should have a Valve employee act as a footstool. It’s the least they can do for breaching my human rights.

Interesting timing; the bug I found in Cold Stream yesterday made it impossible to finish the campaign (couldn’t get out of a safe house after a new section had loaded). That bug wasn’t there when I played it some weeks ago.

yeah, I got through today. The radio does seem pretty wonky; seemed like I had to approach it from a certain angle to be able to turn it on. Cold Stream seems to have a good number of iffy collision meshes, but I don’t know if that was the problem.

There is nothing remotely contentious here. Just giving players more agency in the meta-game (i.e. being able to have a say in the outside of game calls). They did it with the whole Portal 2 releasing thing and that was fine.

VALVe again with their tastless community integration! First Mod-Tools for every game, free DLC and now those basterds let us test play WIP stuff? HOW dare they? I guess next is they throw their below average games at our faces for free! OUCH! Something hit my face just now. Lets have a look what it is. OH look its a copy of Team Fortress 2! Darn you VALVe! DARN YOU! We want 15 euro map packs! Pitchforks and torches everybody!

Way to go Valve… pissing on Professional Game Testers. Can you guys do nothing right?

P.S. This was a joke.

I haven’t got L4D1 or 2 yet, but for cheap like that, I could be tempted. Are they up on Direct2Drive, GamersGate, or GetGamesGo? I have accounts with them… don’t want to make a new login/password/account for this Steam thing.

I can’t fathom why they think the “early release” promise is even a necessary motivator being as there’s a “summer camp ticket” attached to the Stream Crosser achievement. I’d think tht would be more than sufficient to drive people to play through it, probably far more so than the promise of releasing a campaign everyone’s already played a few days early.

Well, I got the achievement last night with a pair of mates and a random filling out our team. The finale seemed more tricky than the standard L4D2 endings. So I’ve done my part. I’m curious to see if 20,000 people will really accomplish this in such a short span of time.

Disagree. The climax of the second map with the long tunnel and stairwell was to me the most challenging thing I have seen in a campaign and a lot of fun. Would be grand to play through it with unlimited ammo m60s or in versus mode.

The latest ATI drivers have been having a conflict with the source engine on my PC. The driver crashes every now and then. It recovers and the game keeps playing, but I lose about 10 seconds of play time….10 valuable seconds were lost last night on the finale of Cold Stream as I was running to the chopper. When the driver recovered, a single survivor had made it into the chopper, I was on the ground and a tank was having its way with me.

You know, after reading the headline I thought for a second that they were going to make us “like” the game on Facebook to make the DLC come out earlier as is popular with publishers these days. I was all ready to to be disappointed in Valve. This is actually not so bad at all, in fact it almost makes sense that a large number of people being able to complete the campaign without major issues is a bit of a benchmark for it being ready.